Because adipose tissues contain 1000 times more stems cells than that may be obtained from the equal amount of bone marrow, various research has been conducted to use adipose tissue-derived stem cells (ASC) as materials for implantation. Further, adipose-derived stem cells are multipotent like marrow-derived stem cells and thus can be differentiated into cartilages, bones, adipocytes, muscle cells, etc. Furthermore, adipose-derived stem cells share similarities with marrow-derived stem cells in expressing cell-surface markers, and have been reported not to induce immune responses to both in vivo and in vitro autotransplantation or xenotransplantation, but rather exhibit potentials in regulating immune responses, thereby gaining attention as an effective method for cell-based therapies.
However, if adipose-derived stem cells are cultured in vitro by a standard culturing method using a conventionally known basal medium, the cell culture requires a lot of time, thereby making it difficult to obtain a clinically effective number of cells. Therefore, the standard culturing method has a disadvantage of low effectiveness in actual clinical applications. In this regard, the present inventors aimed to develop a culturing method for effective clinical treatment methods, and confirmed that adipose-derived stem cells cultured in a growth medium containing epidermal growth factor (EGF) or basic fibroblast growth factor exhibit superior clinical effects compared to adipose-derived stem cells cultured by the standard culturing method (KR Patent Application Publication No, 10-2010-0118491). However, objective analysis on molecular biological, features related to the superior clinical effects of the adipose-derived stem cells cultured in a medium containing EGF or bFGF has not yet been provided.
Especially, for reproducible production of stem cell therapeutic agents having treatment effects above a certain level as an actual medicine, while demonstrating excellent proliferation and therapeutic potentials of stem cells cultured in a growth medium compared to stem cells cultured in a basal medium, it is needed to develop a method for quality control examination to which medicinal effects such as differentiation potential, proliferation potential, and potency of stem cells obtained by an improved culturing method using a growth medium may be applied. Especially, in order to develop a method of evaluating an increase in a yield of cell therapeutic agents and the quality of therapeutic agents, a biomarker capable of representing such is needed.